


Yuletide

by Shayvaalski



Series: The Kids Are Alright [9]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Original Character(s), Parentlock, Parents & Children, Post Reichenbach, Series, possibly trigger warning for skewed family dynamics?, seb moran: minder of highly sensitive people, the kids are alright
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 03:06:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim chooses to celebrate their first Christmas as a family in a somewhat atypical fashion; Siobhan is willing to go along with anything Jim proposes, but Sebastian (predictably) disapproves. It turns out raising a child with James Moriarty is both easier than expected, and vastly more complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yuletide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainbowcolouredshoes](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=rainbowcolouredshoes).



> I work very hard to make sure that the Moran household doesn't come off as abusive, and I think I succeed; but be forewarned that this is a family with some pretty specific standards of what works for them and what doesn't. 
> 
> Jim is not a good person, but he's honestly a pretty good mum.

For a handful of days, Sebastian thinks that Jim has just started decorating early. He’s amused, and a touch startled, that he’s decorating at all; but then they have a little girl in the house now, just barely eight, and Christmas is more for the kids, in Seb’s admittedly limited experience. Wouldn’t have thought it of Jim, in the general course of things, but the man appears to be taking motherhood unnervingly seriously. And Siobhan seems interested in her solemn wild-eyed way, following him as he hangs decorations (she still refuses to be separate from Jim by more than a room unless she’s at school, and Jim is careful about fetching her, more careful than Seb could ever have expected) on a tree Sebastian doesn’t question the origins of. 

It’s when Jim says, thoughtfully, a strand of tinsel dangling from his fingers, “Do you think we should open presents the night before, tiger, or on the morning of the eighteenth? I _seem_ to remember my family did some the night before but it’s been just _ages_ ,” that Sebastian starts to become aware of a familiar sinking feeling he only gets around Moriarty. 

“Boss,” he says, but _carefully._ “You’re off by a week.”

Jim’s head snaps around in a way Seb doesn’t like—they’ve avoided any major breakdowns or blow-ups for nearly six months, but he doesn’t have any hopes of that becoming permanent. Too often lately there’s been a kind of trembling just under the surface of his skin. He wants to reach out and grab Jim, shake him hard, press him up against a wall and take and take until Jim fights back and slams him down, until they understand each other again—

—Siobhan looks up from where she is curled around a book. Sebastian curls his fingers into fists. He can’t. He _won’t._ Not in front of her like this. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips, and Seb is utterly still until she transfers her attention back down to the page. Jim is looking at him, tensed as if to spring. Head cocked in challenge. 

“Alright,” says Seb, backing down and he is _angry_ because seven months ago it would have been blood by now and he aches for it. “Alright, Jim. Presents on the eighteenth and I’ll get a bird at the market tomorrow.”

Jim looks almost disappointed when Sebastian looks away, but smug too, and he drapes the tinsel _just_ so across the mantelpiece. The whole damn house is bedecked. It’s unnerving. Seb has to go outside, into the winter-dormant garden, to get a breath. When he finally musters himself enough to turn and go back in, each of the windows have candles in them, lit and flickering. He licks his lips. Jim and fire don’t play well together, and he has his doubts about the wisdom of exposing Sioban to flame, so Seb barely pauses before going inside. He has to keep them safe. 

He has to. 

***

 

Sebastian gets a phone call from Siobhan’s teacher three days later, and the woman sounds hesitant and just slightly puzzled. He takes the receiver into the other room, away from where the girl—their _daughter_ , he reminds himself—is curled up against Jim’s hip as he composes a letter to a literary agent, watching the fire. Seb has been braced for call for several months now, ever since Siobhan took her down to get enrolled and saw the trapped-beast roll of her neck the first time she caught a glimpse of the primary school. She couldn’t have hurt anyone, he reasons as he exchanges pleasantries with Brigid Flanagan, because that they would have heard about immediately. 

“...I _am_ sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Moran. But I didn’t want you to worry about whether Siobhan was alright—” Seb notes that even though she stumbles and slurs the first S a little, the pronunciation is phonetic, and not gaelic “—and parents often do, when we call during school hours.”

“Mhm.”

“It’s just that, well.” A pause, the sound of papers being shuffled. “We’ve been doing, you know, holiday projects this week, and Siobhan’s been making some rather odd mistakes.”

Sebastian goes very still, and his eyes flick to the wreath on the kitchen door. To the calendar on the wall, with days carefully crossed off, and tomorrow circled in Jim’s precise hand. He swallows. “Like what?”

“Oh, nothing to worry about,” she hastens to reassure him. They have both, after all, met the teacher, and Jim isn’t the kind of man who looks like he will appreciate bad news. “She’s just a little confused in her dates, and switching numbers around like that can be an early sign of dyscalculia. And I know she only became part of your family recently...?”

Sebastian takes a shallow breath. He’s been _waiting_ for this. 

“Yeah. Bit of a tough situation, you know? But she’s got a good home with us.”

“Ah.” The syllable is rich with sympathy and he can’t help grinning. “I’m sure it will resolve, Mr. Moran. But it might be a good idea to sit down with her and maybe go over holidays—make it a fun family game for the three of you?”

“I’ll do that, Miz Flanagan.”

“Oh, Brigid, please.” Seb can hear her warm good-teacher smile, and after a few more niceties he places the phone back in its cradle. A muscle in his neck twitches, the only outward sign of stress; he leans both palms on the table, thinking. In a little while he can safely send Siobhan to bed and have it out with Jim. Maybe. If he can keep it quiet. But Jim is never quiet, Jim is never _soft_ or ordinary or gentle, Jim should not have a child, they should not have this little girl who even now is breathing slow and shallow in their living room, bones like a young bird. Moriarty is wreck and ruin, and she doesn’t need this kind of family. She needs all the help Seb can give her, but she shouldn’t be here with them. They are not a family. They will be the death of her. 

But Sebastian knows Jim will never give her up, this little echo of himself, so Sebastian heaves a rough-edged breath and pushes off from the counter. He scrubs his fingers through his hair, then goes into the other room and says, “Siobhan, love? It’s bedtime.”

Jim blinks and stirs, his hand going to cup the back of Siobhan’s head in an instinctive way that surprises Seb. She curls against him a little more tightly, eyes slitted open. The small man stretches, glances down at her. “I suppose you’re _right_ , tiger. Best for you to go to sleep, pet, before Santa gets here.”

“Jim—”

Something about his tone must give it away because Jim’s head snaps around, pupils blown with no warning. Siobhan comes fully awake at once, fingers twisting into her mum’s shirt, silent. Seb makes a motion towards her, hoping to get her out of harm’s way, but Jim lifts his chin in a way that is _dangerous_ , that is the prelude to violence, and he stops. 

“Come on, boss,” he says, very casually. “We gotta talk, and it’s late for her.”

“Not so late as all that.” Jim pulls Siobhan into his lap and begins to braid her thick black hair, which is longer and more wild than Seb would have thought possible for such a tiny child. His hands move quickly, neat, and he wonders where Jim learned to braid. 

“Late enough.”

Jim’s tongue comes out to touch his lower lip, like a snake tasting the air. Their daughter’s eyes flick from one of them to the other, and he can see her weighing the interaction, calculating the likely result. She’s not afraid and Sebastian can’t decide if that’s good or bad. He has no idea what kind of things Siobhan saw before she was their daughter, what kind of place Jim took her out of—but he knows with a kind of grim intimacy the kind of place he’s put her in. He straightens, military-firm, and repeats, “It’s bedtime, Siobhan.”

Siobhan looks at Jim. 

Sebastian doesn’t actually see him shake his head but he must make some sort of sign because she doesn’t move. But she also doesn’t curl any closer, which Seb is forced to accept as a kind of victory. It feels like a shootout, like he and Jim should be standing with their fingers twitching above their guns, somewhere in the American West. 

“Siobhan, darling.” Jim’s voice is very smooth and very Irish. “Go sit quietly in the kitchen and put your fingers in your ears, will you? I have to, hm... _correct_ your father.” 

Siobhan gets up like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world and starts for the other room; and that is the last straw for Sebastian, seeing her take this like it’s _nothing_ , like there isn’t a bloody thing wrong with what’s about to happen, and what the hell is going to come next if he keeps letting this go on? He doesn’t mind the way Jim leaps for him, the way his body feels slamming against a wall—fuck, he _welcomes_ it, he’s half-starved for it after six months of Jim holding himself back because he’s being _good,_ Sebby—but if Jim ever leaps for their daughter Sebastian does not know what he will do. 

Kill him, probably.

“You can’t _do_ this,” he says with thinking, and Jim’s head snaps around. So does Siobhan’s, if a little more slowly. “Not with her around, Jim, she’s just a kid, this isn’t fucking fair to her—”

“Language,” murmurs Jim, getting to his feet. “Run along, Siobhan, and remember to hum quite loudly. You’re a bit young to hear this.” 

“Jim!”

“Will it make you feel better if she goes to her room?” His voice is like silk over razorblades, his fingers light and treacherous against Seb’s chest. “Because tiger, you’re _no_ kind of father if you’re wound up this tight, so tense all the _time_ —hardly a good environment to raise a child in, when the parents can’t even _communicate—”_ Jim’s hand twists into his collar, nearly cutting off his breath; Sebastian registers that Siobhan has absented herself, sometime in the last few seconds. 

Thank god for small mercies, he supposes as Jim backs him up against a wall, jaw a little dropped and eyes all pupil. Seb lets it happen. At least it will distract him, and by the morning his rage will be spent. He won’t have to worry about Siobhan being caught in the middle of it—

“Stop worrying about her.” Jim’s voice is a low hiss and Sebastian realizes with a cold-water shock that the man is _furious._ Not just angry—not just the amused idle anger he can turn on and off like a tap—but enraged. It’s coming off him in wave after wave, so that Seb gasps under it; the hand Jim is not using to half-strangle him darts out and rips down a garland. The air smells of crushed evergreen. Sebastian can taste it in the back of his throat, bitter, like top-shelf gin. Jim is glittering with fury. “I’m not going to hurt her. I am _not,_ Moran. Are we clear?”

He doesn’t say a word and Jim _roars_ , a nonspecific, brutal kind of sound that Sebastian has never heard anyone else make—that he has hardly ever heard Jim make except for the time he suggested backing off of Sherlock—and Seb stays very still as Moriarty (because this is Moriarty, not Jimmy Moran) whirls away from him. Even beneath his casual sweater and slacks Sebastian can see the tense thrumming lines of his bone and muscle. He stays away from the presents beneath the tree but after ten or fifteen seconds Seb has cause to be grateful that he’s taken to blowing out candles whenever he sees them lit because Jim sweeps a brace of them to the floor before moving on to the rest of the garlands, flooding the room with an almost overwhelming scent of juniper and pine. 

Jim’s body is trembling, his breath coming harsh; Seb pushes off from the wall, because this isn’t the everyday kind of fit, this is the kind that years ago resulted in Jim shredding every single suit Sebastian owned, and he has to stop it before—

A glass ornament shatters beside his head. Jim’s aim is almost perfect so Seb knows it’s a warning shot, knows that if he takes another step the next one will slice into his cheek, that Jim won’t care if he cuts his own hands bloody in the process as long as he comes out on top. Sebastian considers trying to leap for him, bear him to the floor before things get any worse, before he can leave the room, because he has no idea where Siobhan is, what Jim might do in this state. 

“I told you to stop.” Jim cuts him off mid-thought, his voice flat and hard. His thin chest is heaving, eyes seeming to drink in light. “She is my daughter— _our_ daughter _._ You’re not particularly _clever_ but surely even you can understand that, Moran.” 

Sebastian breathes out, and then braces himself and pushes, just a little. “You’ve never been good with kids, boss.” 

What he doesn’t say: Carl Powers. The girl trembling under C4. The sister screaming at Sherlock. Jim’s mouth twists, reading his mind like he always does, and he tilts his head back so that the firelight runs down his neck like water. 

“No.” His voice hisses even on a word without sibilants, heavy with Dublin. “You’re right. I never have been.”  Sebastian presses his palms against the wall as Jim tips his head to one side, then the other. “Siobhan isn’t a child.”

“Boss—Jim, she’s _eight.”_

“Is she?”

Seb is opening his mouth to say of fucking _course_ she is, she’s just a little girl even if she is unusually clever—and then he swallows the words and is silent, because even unspoken they taste like a lie on his tongue. Jim nods, his eyes still very black.

“Just so,” he drawls. “She’s _young,_ sweetheart, I’ll give you that. Very young indeed.” He rocks closer, so that he’s almost touching Sebastian. There’s still anger coming off him but it’s radiating now, not pulsing. One of Jim’s hands brushes the line of Seb’s hip. “But not, I think, a child. And she has nothing to be afraid of from me.” A heartbeat, then very low: “Can’t you _tell?_ ”

Sebastian looks at him a long moment, and Jim is still, letting him look. Jim allowing her to sit with him even on what Seb knows are bad days, or cradling her against his hip as they stand waiting for her first day of school—not love precisely, because Jim doesn’t love, but possession and a kind of mirror-image affection, an understanding of Siobhan as extension or reflection or doubling of self, and under it their daughter is already blooming, as if this is the kind of attention she understands. Or wants, or needs. Seb wonders what his man was like as a boy. What he might have been with parents who understood what he needed to survive. 

Sebastian knows, suddenly, that Jim wants Siobhan to do more than just survive. 

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t think he makes any sort of move that says _I can tell_ , but Jim throws his head back and laughs, delighted and savage and high. “You always get there eventually, Sebby darling,” he says, and leans forward to set his teeth into the skin of Sebastian’s throat. 


End file.
